After two long years since the last release, Cygwin 1.7 (a Linux-like environment that runs on Windows systems) has been released. Among many other improvement, this release adds support for Windows 7 and Server 2008R2.

MSYS/MinGW seems to be a herculean effort mostly on the backs of very few people.

Much the same for Cygwin. One Redhat employee and a small number of dedicated volunteers.

Please also note that MSYS is in fact a fork of Cygwin 1.3.

But *everything* works, eventually.

For some definition of "eventually". Afaik, there is no native version of bash. The MSYS bash depends on the MSYS (nee Cygwin) DLL.

I commonly can get cygwin ports, or just unported linux apps to compile with a few hours work (CLI, of course).

Yeah, but of course it greatly depends on how Unixy a program is. For example, if it uses the likes of fork, select, or ptys in non-trivial ways, you've got a substantial redesign on your hands. Also, it's not just a one-off effort as the upstream program continues to evolve.

Horses for courses.

At this point, "unofficial" gcc mingw compilers are coming out many months ahead of regular official releases, and Cygwin releases are years behind mingw (look at the gcc 4.x series).

Cygwin 1.7 ships with gcc-4.3.4 as default. gcc-4.5 is in the works, as is the MinGW cross-compiler.